Barista Magazine

APR-MAY 2018

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In the meantime, Kali says, the Beans for
PR initiative has made her feel connected to
the coffee world beyond the island. "It also
helped me see how people within this commu-
nity are so eager to help and lend a hand. Café
Regina hadn't even been operating for one full
year before we were forced to close for two
and a half months. This is my fi rst business
and I am still very young, so this put me in a
very scary situation."
Café Regina is one of the more new-school
cafés to have opened up in addition to Baraka,
with Café Comunión another entering the
scene in early 2018. These are shops that want
to serve high-quality Puerto Rican coffee
alongside roasters from around the world in
order to educate the coffee-drinking commu-
nity on what exists beyond the more severely
roasted commercial blends with which the
island is associated.
"The kind of varieties that have bigger
yields and lower quality—that's what the
government tells [farmers] to grow, and
since the government is selling them the cof-
fee trees, they always pick certain varieties
and they're not necessarily the varieties that
are native to Puerto Rico and they're not
necessarily the varieties that have the best
taste and quality," Gabriel explains. "We're a
little farther away from the equator, so what
you can get in Colombia at 6,000 feet you can
get in Puerto Rico at 3,000 feet, as far as the
development of the bean and the acidity and
all those things. We can produce really good
coffee. I know people who are old-school
and focus on the variety, but those are very
few. Maybe it would take a bigger effort on
the government's part to incentivize those
farmers who are about quality."
Going forward, once the crops have
recovered, steadily proving there's a mar-
ket for specialty roasts will be the key to
getting Puerto Rican coffee on the world's
radar and sustaining a coffee culture on the
island—with or without the government's
help. "Smaller roasters like us and oth-
ers have to ask for the product," Gabriel
says, "because it's a risk for farmers to go
through all that trouble."
Global
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AND WHERE BOOKS ARE SOLD
Roberto Atienza surveys
the fallen coff ee trees at his
family estate, Hacienda San
Pedro.
PHOTO
BY
JOSE
MADERA
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